Coffee Filter Flowers

Gracen and I have been spending a whole lot of time at the beach lately (yay!), but this afternoon, we finally got around to finishing off a fun little project we started days and days ago.

It began like this. Coffee filters, coloured water, and a plastic dropper out, creative table-style. Simply left out for her to discover and explore when she felt up to it.

Of course it didn’t take Grae long to find a table full of fun materials to experiment with. Without hesitation, she began using her dropper to slurp up coloured water and spew it back out on the filters.

She really loved watching how the colours spread and mixed with one another.

So much in fact, that she fully covered upwards of 30 separate filters. Thank goodness for a big laundry drying rack! We placed the filters on the rack in our solarium, and they dried in no time.

After tucking them away for several days, we came home from the beach today {some of us still sporting our bathing suits and sandy fingernails} and dug them out for a quick pre-nap project. We also gathered a pair of scissors, some long green pipe cleaners, and some short colourful pipe cleaners (regular pipe cleaners cut into thirds).

To transform our beautiful watercolour-y filters into flowers, we started by carefully folding them in half three times.

Then Grae would give me some sort of petal description (‘long and skinny!’, ‘pokey like the rose bush!’, ‘big, big, big, big, BIIIIIIIG!’, and ‘you know…..like….ummmm….like the little circle circle ones?’ were a few) and I’d cut the curved edge to match. I also snipped the very tip of the point off at this point too.

Then came her very favourite part – carefully unfolding the cut filter to reveal its shape.

Here are a few of the other shapes we came up with together.

Next, Grae would pick a small pipe cleaner, bend over the top so it was no longer pokey, and place the bottom through the tiny hole in the centre of the filter.

Then she’d bring the filter up around the pipe cleaner and pinch it at the base.

While she held it tightly, I’d wrap a long green pipe cleaner around the filter and short pipe cleaner to form the stem.

Fun, right?

Every flower turned out completely different from the last…

And by the end we had a beautiful bouquet of colourful flowers perfect for the mantle, a table centrepiece, or a Mother’s Day gift.

♥

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